Mark Goldblatt - Bumper Sticker Liberalism: Peeling Back the Idiocies of the Political Left

For
my mother,
Leona Goldblatt,
who would have been
antagonized by every page

Contents

Sticker Shock:
By Way of an Introduction

Its a runaway American dream, and youre right in the middle of it. Youre cruising along Route 80 at fifty-five miles per hour, not a mile per hour more or less because thats the kind of law-abiding guy you are; youre taking in the sights: the purple mountains, the fruited plains, the billboard for the next Applebees. Youve got Springsteen songs blaring through the speakersearly Springsteen, before he got preachy, back when he was still crowbarring neighborhood girls names into his lyrics in order to get laid. This is the reason youre here, moments like this, the reason your great-grandparents slept on roach-infested mattresses in the holes of steamships, the reason your grandparents worked seventy-five-hour weeks taking in laundry and digging ditches, the reason your mom made you do your homework in grammar school, the reason your dad enlisted to fight the Nazis; the generations have unwound themselves to this, to this life, to this American life, to this two-week paid vacation, to this instant, to you, your music, your tinted windshield, at one with the manifest destiny of the United States...

Then, at once, you hear a quick horn tap and notice, out of the corner of your eye, a silver blur veering out in front of you. Youre being cut off... sideswiped if you dont react. You pump the brake and swerve to the right, avoiding the Prius by no more than a couple of feet. Your heart races, but you manage to control your vehicle, which now trails the Prius by several yards. You take a deep breath, then another. You stare out at the Prius, at the back of the drivers head, more in astonishment than in anger. Then, at last, you catch sight of his bumper sticker:

Heal the Earth. Stop Making People.

If you were a road rage kind of guy, rather than a law-abiding kind of guy, youd be ramming that sentiment right up Peter Priuss ass about now. But thats not you. Whats more, youre as fond of the earth as the next terrestrial. You recycle. You turn off the light when you leave a room. You dont run the air conditioner when no ones home.

Except now the weenie in the weenie-mobile is telling you where to park your wiener? You wonder how that snide little dispatch from ecocentral is going to sit with your next-door neighbors who, after years of trying to start a family, just took out a second mortgage on their home to pay for in vitro fertilization. Whos going to tell them that their pursuit of happiness has to be canceled for the well-being of Gaia, that those baby booties the missus has been knitting carry too large a carbon footprint?

You wonder if such qualms have ever crossed the mind of Peter Prius, if hes thought past the slogan, if he has the vaguest inkling of the totalitarian overtones of Stop Making People .

Then again isnt that the point of a political bumper sticker? You dont have to think about it. You dont have to think beyond it. You dont have to think. Its the perfect antidote to critical thought. Its clever, pithy, often nasty... and altogether unexamined. Its an argumentative marker, a gauntlet thrown down from the sanctuary of the drivers seat. You dont have to defend your ideas with your pedal to the metal. Your bumper sticker says, in effect, This is how I roll.

But it does more than that. It divvies up the world, separates the enlightened few from the benighted many, the courageous truth-tellers from the craven deniers, the wheat from the chaff; it usses in the us and thems out the them without slowing you down even one mile per hour. No back-sassing. No tailgating. No wind resistance.

Honk as you eat my self-righteous dust!

Which brings us to the title of this book: Bumper Sticker Liberalism . What Im going to argue is that modern American liberalism is no longer a system of beliefs about the role of government, the conduct of international relations, or the nature of personal responsibility. Rather, its a series of bumper stickers. Actual bumper stickers that signal mental bumper stickers. They dont make sense individually. They dont make sense in concert. Yet if you peel them away, one by one, from the foreheads of liberals, theres nothing left underneath.

It was not always thus. Enough has been written about the ironic evolution of the term liberal the fact that many of todays conservative thinkers would have been classified, less than a century ago, as classical liberals in the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson. So lets take the term as we find it... that is, a contemporary liberal is a person who believes that government should work toward leveling the material conditions of its citizens; that discrepancies in individual attainment, especially if they track with ethnic, gender, or sexual identities, must be the result of ongoing oppression; that intellectual, moral, or cultural judgments always reflect the bias of whoever is doing the judging; that the idea of objective truth or impartial standards is fraudulent, and that human beings occupy no special place in the grand scheme of thingsindeed, that the very notion of a grand scheme of things is a quaint superstition. In other words, contemporary liberals prize equalityamong people, among perspectives, even among biological speciesover every other value. The lone hierarchy liberals will admit, the lone exception to their dogged egalitarianism, is their conviction that conservatives are always wrong.

There is nothing extraordinarily worrisome about any of this. The worry comes when liberals attempt to translate their egalitarian impulses into political action. For in doing so, they always get mugged by reality: The real world is not an egalitarian place. On the contrary, the real world is teeming with intellectual, moral and cultural hierarchies, self-evident truths and universal standards. To acknowledge these, for liberals, is to get caught up in the inexorable logic that leads to conservatism. It is argumentative suicide.

Thus the liberal bumper sticker.

T HE ORIGINS OF the bumper sticker are murky. The automobile bumper came into widespread use in the United States with the introduction of the Ford Model A in 1927. It was intended as nothing more than a safety device. But the very nature of the thinga metal attachment designed to get scuffed up, and thus unsuitable to inlaid ornamentation, yet always in the sight line of the driver behind youcried out with commercial possibilities. The earliest bumper stickers werent even stickers; they were cardboard and metal advertisements affixed with wire that was wrapped around the bumper. The first true bumper sticker seems to have been the brainchild of Forest P. Gill, a Kansas City silk screener and local businessman, who, in the years after World War II, utilized two new inventions: fluorescent Day-Glo ink and tough, adhesive-backed paper. The bumper sticker soon became a popular souvenir of life on the road, evidence of the worldly drivers encounters with various tourist traps, amusement parks and county fairs.

The evolution of the bumper sticker from a miniature travelogue to an expression of personal and political belief picked up steam in the 1950s, with the Dwight EisenhowerAdlai Stevenson presidential contests of 1952 and 1956: I Like Ike versus Madly for Adlai. (Notice that conservatives, even then, preferred their rhymes straight; liberals, offbeat and slanty and nonjudgmental.) Like many things in America, the bumper sticker took an infantile turn in the second half of the 1960s with in-your-face mottos such as Make Love, Not War and Black Power. Much has been written about that grotesquely celebrated eraIll have more to say about it in the chapters that followbut if youre looking for the moment when political bumper stickers mutated from happy declarations of candidate preferences to stand-alone rationales for collective action, this was it.